(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #4:

Most of training staff and leadership is going to fall to you. There’s isn’t much a computer can do to make a person a better staff member. MasterVision can though help you track some of that work:

MasterVision can track students who assist in teaching a class. On the attendance screen there is a spot where you enter the instructor for the class. This person is setup in the Employee section of MasterVision. You can also though add a student assistant by double-clicking the “Instructor” label on the attendance screen and then adding a student.

In the reporting section of MasterVision, in the Attendance section, there are “Assistant Detail” and “Assistant Totals” reports that you can use to see how many classes a particular student has helped out with.

So let’s start looking at Mike Massie’s Growing Your Dojo and how MasterVision can help you with all these steps. Mike starts with step #0:

Step #0 – Setting your school up to be profitable from day one. This means low overhead, period. Probably the one thing that most often tanks small businesses before they get off the ground is starting with a lot of debt and overhead. Avoid both like the plague.

MasterVision can’t help you with your rent, but I can help you with the cost of software to run your school:

MasterVision $50/month x 12 months = $600

The other guys $177.25/month x 12 months = $2127

So MasterVision saves you $1,527 per year that you can put back in your business or into your pocket. If you are paying yourself $50,000 a year, you just got a 3% raise. After 5 years, you’ve saved $7,635. That’s the easiest $7,000 dollars you’ll ever make.

In the coming days, I’ll show you how MasterVision can help you with all those steps. In the meantime, I’d recommend you follow along with Mike’s daily email. You can subscribe to that here (the yellow ‘Click here for free MA Biz Tips!).

Why do you want software for your martial arts school? That’s a question that stumps a lot of people when I ask it. They know the school down the street has software, so they must need software. Or they think they need software for their school to be “professional”. Or they just have a “feeling” that they should have software.

All of those are really, really bad reasons to buy software.

There are two reasons – and only two reasons – why you should consider software for your martial arts school: Organization & Efficiency and Business Intelligence. If these two reasons don’t apply to you, then don’t buy martial arts software.

Organization & Efficiency

Are you having any of these problems:

Feeling disorganized

Spending more time than you want on the paperwork of running a school

Not doing things you should be doing because they take too much time

Hiring people to do the paperwork chores that take too much time

Those are problems of Organization & Efficiency and computers are very, very good at solving those issues.

Sure, for each new student you could put their name & address on a sticky note and throw it in a desk drawer, but software can do better than that. Software keeps all of that information organized, makes it easy for you to find it, and makes it easy to change it all. This is your Organization improvement.

Software is also much faster which makes you more efficient. Sure, you can mentally go through every student in your school and make a list of who’s ready to test. Or you can go to the computer and print out that list in 5 seconds without having to think. Sure, you’ve got great calligraphy skills and can create exam certificates in a couple hours, or you can go to the computer and have it print out beautiful, customized exam certificates in a minute. This is your Efficiency improvement.

If you want to be more organized and more efficient with your time, then you do need software for your school.

Business Intelligence

Software (well, good software) is very good at crunching numbers so you can know exactly what is going on in your business – what is known as Business Intelligence. It’s Business Intelligence that let’s you know if what you are doing is working or not. Maybe you can run a school by the seat of your pants, but software can tell you exactly what is going on. Things like:

How many active students you had every month over the last three years and present it all in a nice graph that shows you exactly how your school is doing.

What your retention rate is – how many active students I had last month (or last quarter or last year) and how many are still enrolled

Tell you how much tuition you should be collecting this coming month

Track all of your marketing and tell you how well each marketing source does in costs to get a lead and cost to get an enrollment.

If you want business intelligence insights into how your school is doing so that you can improve, then martial arts software might be right for you.